Syndicate

Home » Yet Another President Commits the Ultimate War Crime of Launching a War of Aggression

Yet Another President Commits the Ultimate War Crime of Launching a War of Aggression

April 7, 2017 - 9:50am  lindorff

Here we go again:

by:

Dave Lindorff

We already know that the supposed Sarin gas attack on a neighborhood in Damascus, which nearly led to an all-out attack on Syria by the US under President Obama in 2013 -- a criminal war that was only prevented by Russia stepping in with a deal to supervise the removal and destruction of all of Syria’s stocks of chemical weapons -- was actually a “false flag” attack conducted by Syrian rebels using Sarin supplied from Turkey -- the same rebels who now control Khan Shiekhun. Unmentioned in US reports and government statements about the missile attack is the fact that the UN's Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had already investigated and monitored the removal and the destruction of all Syria's chemical weapons by 2016, and had declared that such chemicals and weapons had all been eliminated or removed from the country under the terms of an agreement reached between the US, Russia and Syria.

But putting aside the question of who actually poisoned those victims in Khan Sheikhun, the reality is that international law, as codified in the UN Charter, a treaty which the US has signed, declares the supreme war crime to be for a country to attack another when it poses no imminent threat to the attacker. Absent such an existential threat, the only legal way one country may attack another is when that military action has been approved by a vote of the United Nations Security Council. No such UN resolution has been passed regarding international action in Syria, where the only legal foreign military actor is Russia, which was invited by the internationally recognized Assad government.

Meanwhile the US media are cheering this illegal action by President Trump, while most Americans appear disinterested or ignorant about in the whole thing, or are supportive of an effort portrayed as being designed to “punish” Syrian President Assad for his alleged crime of poison-gassing civilians in his own war-torn country. (Shares in Raytheon, maker of the $1-million-a-shot Tomahawk missile were up almost 1.75% by early afternoon following the nighttime attack on Syria, and other arms industry stocks were also up on the likelihood of more war and deeper US involvement in the Syrian conflict.)

Jess Guh's Posts

As a queer woman, when it comes to film, I fulfill pretty much all of the stereotypes. I don’t really like action films. I am underwhelmed by special effects and action sequences. As my wife once complained, “All the movies you like… nothing happens in them.” My undergraduate...